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150 years ago today, a brilliant but painfully shy Oxford University mathematician and Anglican deacon named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three daughters of his dean on one of many rowing excursions on the Thames; as was his custom he told them an ex tempore “fairy tale”, but on this particular occasion the second-oldest asked him to write the story down for her afterward. The girl’s name was Alice Liddell; the teacher wrote his non-academic publications under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and the story became the one we know as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Yesterday I published a column about it, including a critical examination of the popular myth that Carroll was a pedophile; The Independent also commemorated the occasion with an article, and if it’s been a while since you read them you may enjoy these PDF copies of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and “The Hunting of the Snark”.

Modern masters of nonsense are usually far less benign than the gentle Carroll; one of these is out-of-control lawyer Charles Carreon, about whom my fellow guest-blogger Ken from Popehat has told us so much lately; this is a page which generates faux quotes in Carreon’s often-bizarre style. But Carreon can’t hold a candle to L. Ron Hubbard; this Scientology “assessment” juxtaposes mundane (if nosy) inquiries such as “Have you ever been a coward?” and “Have you ever been a professional prostitute?” with such bizarre queries as “Have you ever stolen a body from another being?”, “Have you ever obliterated a language?” and “Have you ever despoiled a planet of its natural resources?”

12 Responses to “Links for a Golden Afternoon”

An additional fact perhaps of interest: Alice Liddell’s father Henry was the co-author, with Robert Scott, of the monumental Greek-English Lexicon, the standard reference for Ancient Greek. In addition to the full version, there are two smaller versions more commonly used by students. The three are known colloquially as the “Big Liddell”, “Middle Liddell”, and “Little Liddell”, with “Liddell” pronounced like “Middle”.

I have long felt that the modern tendency to assert that we “know” that this or that historical figure was Gay, or a pedophile, or had an affaire with his sister (when it wasn’t known at the time), is based on the Baby Boom’s assumption that everybody is as horny and incapable of self control as they are. Any man who preferred the company of other men has to have been Gay; it can’t possibly be that he liked talking “shop”, drinking, and smoking and was married to a woman picked out for him by his father. Any man who worked with young boys HAS to have been a pedophile-predator; it simply isn’t possible that he enjoyed molding young minds and/or had the self control to keep his hands to himself.

It doesn’t help that the vast majority of Boomers have the the sense of history one normally associates with a chunk of sandstone.